Paul Gluckman

Under BlackBerry’s agreement with Amazon Web Services to develop and market BlackBerry’s cloud-based intelligent vehicle data system, code-named Ivy, to automotive OEMs, BlackBerry “will own all the commercial relationships with customers” and will share revenue with AWS, said BlackBerry CEO John Chen on a fiscal Q3 investor call Thursday. AWS and BlackBerry announced the agreement Dec. 1. Modern vehicles generate huge amounts of data, but the auto industry “is not prepared to capture and create value from the analytics” because the data are difficult to collect and monetize “without very costly integrations,” said Chen. Ivy’s task “is to make it easy to gather, securely transport and analyze these data in a standard and a cost-efficient way across multiple brands and models on a common platform,” he said. The multiyear pact with AWS is an “exclusive co-development and co-marketing agreement,” he said. “This type of agreement is rare. BlackBerry and AWS engineers have been working very closely to jointly build the platform.” The effort will yield “an ecosystem of apps and services developed on the BlackBerry Ivy platform over time,” he said. The platform’s “recurring revenue model” will monetize data analytics apps and services on per-use and subscription bases, he said. “An important difference between BlackBerry Ivy and competitors in this space is that we allow the OEM to own the data and with that the relationship with their customers. We’re already in discussion with some automakers who were granted early access and we have received positive initial feedback.” The target is to commercialize the first Ivy apps and services in time for automakers’ 2023 model year, he said. “While it is too early for us to provide a revenue outlook, we are confident that BlackBerry Ivy addresses a very large market opportunity.”

U.S. e-commerce sales rose 33% year over year in the first nine months of 2020, while traditional retail sales grew 1%, said Brie Carere, FedEx chief marketing and communications officer. E-commerce package shipping volume is expected to more than triple to 111 million packages daily by 2026 from 2019, she told a quarterly call Thursday.

CES 2021 as an all-virtual event has pre-show registrations “into six figures,” CTA President Gary Shapiro told us Wednesday. A stickler for years for physical CES independent attendance audits, CTA has no methodology for measuring or verifying its such digital participation, he conceded. “The challenge that we’re facing is that we’d love to audit that, but there’s no established auditing procedures for doing who attends. We do have a reputation for honesty that’s well-deserved, and we bolstered it by having an independent audit. The numbers should be clean in terms of what we finally get.” CTA originally planned to do the virtual CES 2021 on the same Jan. 6-10 dates as the canceled physical Las Vegas show before moving it to Jan. 11-14.

CES 2022 will have a digital component and “we also plan to be physical in Las Vegas because of that five-sense experience of being with people,” CTA Gary Shapiro told a CES 2021 virtual briefing Tuesday. “We love technology and what it’s doing” to enable society to communicate during the pandemic, he said. “But it’s really not the same as being there face to face.” CTA prerecorded the briefing remarks “for practical reasons,” said Jean Foster, senior vice president-marketing and communications, without explaining why. She, Shapiro and Executive Vice President-CES Karen Chupka appeared for a live Q&A. Bob Bejan, Microsoft corporate vice president-global events, production studios and marketing community, appeared only on video to describe the Microsoft cloud technology platform on which CES 2021 will run. Its cost in dollars runs in the seven figures, Shapiro said. Show organizers will deploy “the safest methods possible” to return to a physical CES in January 2022, said Shapiro. He hopes the COVID-19 vaccine will “be used by a great portion of the population,” he said. “We’ll be looking at all our sanitary methods and doing the best practices, but already, a whole bunch -- hundreds of exhibitors -- have signed up for CES 2022 in Las Vegas. The city of Las Vegas is waiting and ready for us.”

Broadcom’s wireless revenue in fiscal Q4, ended Nov. 1, was 31% of its semiconductor business and up 43% sequentially from Q3, with the launch of the “new-generation flagship phone by our large North American OEM customer,” said CEO Hock Tan on an investor call Thursday, in obvious reference to the iPhone 12. Broadcom announced multiyear agreements in January to supply Apple with $15 billion in wireless components and modules. Wireless revenue declined 9% year-on-year, due to the one-quarter delay in ramping up “production of that program,” said Tan. Broadcom now expects fiscal Q1 “to be up over 50% year-on-year,” he said.

Twenty-one CES 2021 exhibitors plan half-hour news conferences Jan. 11, 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. EST, said CTA’s Media Day schedule released Thursday. Hisense, Intel/Mobileye and Sony have their time slots to themselves, but the others will need to compete with one or two companies with events scheduled concurrently. “Top exhibitors will break news to a media-only audience, just as they would normally do at CES Media Days in Las Vegas,” said CTA. Media Day news conferences at the physical Las Vegas show typically run 45 minutes each, not 30. CES 2021 listed 862 exhibitors as signed on through midday Thursday, up from 806 a day earlier. CTA said 4,400 exhibitors participated in the physical CES 2020 January in Las Vegas.

That the one PC in the average home was used “episodically” pre-pandemic “caught some people flatfooted” when COVID-19 hit, said Matt Baker, Dell Technologies senior vice president-strategy and planning, at a virtual Raymond James investor conference. “People are turning to the PC because it’s a flexible platform on which they can perform a myriad of tasks, from working through a spreadsheet to watching a Netflix movie.” Adoption of multiple PCs in the average home is a tech trend that’s bound to stick “for quite some time to come,” Baker said Tuesday. “One PC per household is no longer sufficient.” Consumer behavior toward tech changed during the crisis, and the change is “likely to be deeper and longer-lasting” than many realize, he said. Companies that haven’t invested in their digital transformation “have suffered disproportionately” through the pandemic, said Baker. “Leaders” in digital transformation “have really weathered the storm a lot better,” he said. “That’s going to motivate people to invest even more than they may have in the past.” Dell sees that “as a catalyst for growth going forward and a tailwind coming out of what has been a headwind for many industries from the impact of the pandemic,” he said.

AT&T’s decision last week to release Warner Pictures' full 2021 film slate on HBO Max in a one-month streaming exclusive simultaneously with the movies’ theatrical release (see 2012030054) was born of the realization that “we probably needed to try something different” as COVID-19 prevents consumers from returning to theaters, AT&T CEO John Stankey told a UBS investor conference Tuesday. “There is a win-win-win type of solution here” for consumers, AT&T and theater owners, he said. (Select "past" and then "12/8" presentation materials here.)

Verizon’s agreement to offer discovery+ free to subscribers on select plans (see 2012020049) won’t be its last partnership with a content company, but it will be selective, Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg told a virtual UBS investor conference Tuesday. “We’re not going to bring in 100 companies here.” His Q&A was postponed 24 hours due to unexplained “technical difficulties” with the UBS virtual platform.

Verance and Samsung appear to have settled their legal spat over Verance allegations that Samsung reneged on $1.31 million in license royalties for the 7 million Blu-ray players it shipped embedded with Cinavia audio watermark detectors (see 2009200001). The case was terminated Nov. 30 after Verance attorneys filed a notice of voluntary dismissal (in Pacer, docket 1:20-cv-07720) with the U.S. District Court in Manhattan. Verance described Samsung as “an important business partner” even after filing the action in mid-September, expressing hope then that the matter would be “resolved quickly and fairly.” There was little or no activity in the docket since the case was filed. Verance declined comment Friday about the apparent settlement. Samsung didn't respond to questions.